Recommendations: Illustrated: Snapshot of the mind

Colin McDowell sets his sights on the most beautiful illustrated volumes of 2003

Even those of us who live neatly ordered, trim little lives are occasionally gripped by the need to be somewhere other. Illustrated books fulfil that need. Leaping over space and time, they engage us with different attitudes and ways of life and can stimulate the mind as well as the imagination. At their best, they are an education.

They don’t come much better than Henri Cartier-Bresson (Thames & Hudson £48), a retrospective of the work of the photographer from whom posterity will learn about people, their lives and the way that cities and landscapes once were. Classic images from around the world make this volume indispensable. Less personal, but as stunning, Wilderness: Earth’s Last Wild Places (Chicago UP £40) combines truly fabulous pictures of the world’s last untouched places with essays by a variety of authorities that explain that if the wildernesses are to survive, positive action is necessary now.